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Tanks crushing Anti-Tank guns


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Just thought it would be cool to be able to crush an anti-tank gun if you could get close to it instead of shooting at it...What got me thinking about it was these quotes from memoirs...Mostly dealing with the KV tank..

German General Reinhardt, commander of the 41st PzKorp, regarding the battle of the Dubissa river on June 23rd 1941, between 80 BT tanks and 20 KVs of 2nd Soviet armoured division, and the entire 6th PzDiv equipped with PzKpfw IVs and PzKpfw 35(t):

"One hundred of our tanks, which about a third were PzKpfw IV, occupied their positions against a counter-strike. Part of our forces met the enemy frontaly, but most of them were in their flanks. They hit the steel monsters from the three sides, but the attempts to destroy them were unsuccessful. By the contrary, it were our tanks the ones who were knocked-out. After a long struggle with the Soviet giants, the German armoured units began to withdraw trying to avoid the aniquilation. [...] One of them [the KVs] get close to a panzer who was stuck in a moody brook. Without hesitation, the black monster just roll over it, crushing it completely. At that time, arrived a German howitzer of 105 mm; its commander, seeing the aproximation of enemy tanks, ordered to open a continue fire, without causing any damage. One of them [the KVs] get close to 100m of the howitzer, which fired again, and its grenate hit the tank with all its strenght. The tanks stopped as hit by a lightning. "We made it!" thought the gunners. "Yes, we made it!!!", told the captain of the piece. But the expresson in their faces suddenly changed when one of them shouted: "It's moving again!!". There was no doubt when the shining caterpillar get close to the howitzer and crushed it as a toy, keep on moving later as nothing would happened." In that battle, the KVs of the 2nd Armoured Division claimed to destroy 40 panzers and 40 guns (most of them anti-tank guns of 37 mm, crushed the same way that the howitzer).

About end of July 1941, Lt.General A. Yeremenko sent a reports to D.G.Pavlov, commander of the Western Front:

"In the sector of the 107th Division, we sent a KV to silence an anti-tank eneny battery. It [the KV] crushed the artillery, it went all over upwards and downwards the emplacements of the enemy guns, it was hit more than 200 times, but the armour wasn't penetrated, even when it was hit by guns of every type."

[ March 22, 2003, 04:40 PM: Message edited by: Erwin Rommel ]

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